Building the Mail app

Hundreds of thousands of folks have been using the “App Preview” of Mail on a daily basis since the Windows 8 Release Preview. We’ve also been updating it along the way through the new Windows Store with more updates planned. In this post we go into the background of the Mail app and talk about the design and features, especially relative to Metro style design principles. This isn’t an exhaustive list of Mail features or features yet to be added and primarily focuses on the design and integration with Windows 8. This post was written by Jeremy Epling, a lead program manager on the Windows Live team. This is the second in a series of posts on the new apps. --Steven

When we started planning the email experience for Windows 8, our goal was to create an app that embodied the Metro style design principles. It needed to be fast and fluid, be great with touch and a keyboard and mouse, focus on your content, provide the right features at the right time, and fulfill our expectations of email on modern devices. Starting from scratch gave us an opportunity to carry forward the essential functions of an email app, while also designing features with a fresh eye and taking advantage of what Windows 8 offers uniquely.

How people use email today

At the start of our design process, we conducted research into how people use email today. Email has been around for decades. It’s changed a lot and so have our expectations.

Multiple email accounts are common. The average user has 2 to 3 email accounts. One is for work, one is personal, and another account might be used primarily for mailing lists and coupons, or isn’t used frequently, like an account from a school that you no longer attend.

We receive a lot of email. Our data shows that those who we would consider light email users receive more than about 180 messages a week, while heavy email users receive more than 2100 messages a week. These numbers are growing as more services come online and support newsletters, coupons, receipts, and other types of messages via email. We need to make it easy to quickly get through all your email.

Folders aren’t used that often. This is probably a surprise to many people who rely heavily on folders, which is a very common practice in many enterprise environments, and for enthusiasts. At some enterprises, users have up to 50 folders, while the majority of people using Exchange and Hotmail have far fewer folders. The right balance for Mail was to make folders easy to use, but not to optimize for 50+ folders and deeply-nested hierarchies.

Email is real-time. While email is often used for asynchronous communication, where you don’t expect an immediate response, more and more, the expectation is for an immediate, real-time response. After you sign up for a new service, you’re often told to expect an email immediately. We expect to be notified the instant a new email comes in and most people check their email frequently throughout the day or leave it running all day long so they can see every message as it comes in.

People expect consistency with mobile phone experiences. Many people are using their phones in conjunction with their PCs. In fact, they’re using their phones for triage, reading, and filing away of mail (among other things). The importance of consistency between your phone view and PC view of email are more important than ever. The use of standard protocols such as Exchange Active Sync as implemented in the Mail app are increasingly important, especially because this protocol allows for syncing of contacts and calendar, in addition to mail. (Don’t worry, support for other protocols, such as IMAP, are on the way.)

We took these trends into account as guiding principles as we began to consider how people would use the Mail app to manage their email, write messages, and stay up-to-date.

Managing email

Accounts and folders

One of the goals of Metro style design is to emphasize the content of the app, and de-emphasize UI commands or navigation that you use rarely. We wanted the Mail app to allow you to focus on the most important aspects of doing email. The 16:9 aspect ratio of Windows 8 made it possible for us to comfortably fit all the essential pieces of content that we use every day: accounts, folders, messages, and a reading pane. It provides an easy way for you to quickly take in all of your email without switching views, and while still feeling open. This is a change from the way it appeared in Consumer Preview, where we only showed messages and a reading pane. We realized that switching accounts and folders wasn’t fast and fluid enough (and customer feedback supported this conclusion). Because folders and accounts are key pieces of content that you need to see, we updated the design to show them in Release Preview.

3-pane design of the Mail app

Both of these realizations led to the 3-pane design that you see in the Release Preview today. This design shows your different accounts so it is just just one tap to switch between them. The unread count on each account makes it easy to see if you have new mail to look at in that account. The same is true for folders. Even though most users don’t have many folders, they are a core way that many people use email, so we made it easy to quickly switch between them. An always-present folder list is especially valuable for people who use server rules to automatically filter their email into specific folders.

Commands

We spent a lot of time deciding which functionality, or commands,would be always visible in the app so that most people wouldn’t be distracted by commands they never used. We decided to include commands for the tasks that every person uses almost every time they launch Mail: creating, responding to, and deleting messages. All the respond commands are grouped into a single top-level command since they preform a similar function. Delete is in the corner, which also aligns with the Cancel command when writing an email.

Some people change the read/unread state of emails or move emails frequently, but for the majority of users, this is actually a pretty rare task. Deleting, starting a new mail, and responding to mail dramatically overshadow these as common tasks, so we made sure these commands would always be visible. The other commands are quickly accessible via the app bar at the bottom of the screen (Windows key + Z, or swipe up from the bottom of the screen, or right-click to invoke the app bar). If you select multiple messages, we anticipate that you’re likely to use “Mark as read” or “Move,” so we automatically bring up the app bar for you.

The app bar automatically appears when you select multiple messages

Message list

In Release Preview, we also updated the message list to show as many messages as possible, to help you get through your email more quickly. The message list spans from the top to the bottom of the app, doesn’t show a message preview, and uses a smaller font than before. At a resolution of 1366x768, this allows you to see 14 messages instead of the 8.5 messages you could see in Consumer Preview. It’s a delicate balance to create a message list that has large enough items to work great for touch, but still provides the density that many enthusiasts expect. We also added profile pictures to the message list, so you can quickly spot messages from the people you care about most, like friends and family. This helps the message list come alive and provide a more personal experience. The profile picture comes from your friends on different social networks that you’ve connected to your Microsoft account.

Reading pane

The reading pane makes it fast and fluid to switch between messages, so you don’t need to go through a full page transition. The reading pane is optimized to be 640px wide so it can fit newsletters, receipts, and other commercial mail without showing a horizontal scrollbar. Also, we’ve found that when using our default reading font, 640px is the optimal width for reading a line of text so you don’t get eye fatigue or lose your place. When you receive an email we restrict the text to conform to this optimal line length, whenever possible.

There is a large profile picture so it’s easy to see who sent the message. We made the subject line bold to make it stand out more in the reading pane, since it sets the context of the message. If you know on the sender or another recipient of the message via a social network that’s connected to your Microsoft account, you can tap on her name to view her profile page in the People app. From there, you can see her latest status, send an IM, etc.

Writing email

The screen you see when writing an email is composed of two panes, side-by-side, so that you have more room to write your message. The touch keyboard limits the amount of vertical space available, so it didn’t make sense to put the To, Cc, and other information above the body of the email. To create more space for your content, we put the To and Cc lines in one pane, and the subject and body into another. This also groups the info logically: all the information related to addressing the message is in one group, and your content is in another. The formatting commands are hidden by default to give you more space to write your email.

Writing an email

Even though formatting is not used frequently in email, it is critical when you need it. To make it easier to format messages, Mail automatically shows the formatting commands when you select text in the message pane. After you apply formatting, the commands go away so you have more room to focus on what you’re writing. Our goal is to provide the right commands at the right time. When you’ve selected text, it’s most likely because you want to copy or format that text, so those options automatically come up. Many of the formatting keyboard shortcuts that you’re used to from Outlook work as well.

When writing an email, select some text and the formatting commands automatically appear above the keyboard.

Designed for Windows 8

Another part of designing a great Metro style app is to make sure it takes advantage of the unique aspects of Windows 8. Mail does this by deeply integrating into the operating system to make it easier to share, print, and stay up-to-date on your email.

Snap

I frequently snap Mail to the side of another app (or the desktop) so that I can easily stay on top of it while I’m doing something else. It allows me to instantly see when I have new email and act on it. I can delete, move, or respond directly from the snapped Mail pane, so I can quickly get back to what I was doing. In Release Preview, you can also switch accounts and folders in the snapped state, so you can stay on top of any folder or account while you’re using another app. With these updates, it’s easy to keep the snapped view of Mail up all day long.

This is really useful if you are composing a long email and need to copy and paste things into it from multiple apps. You can start a new message, snap Mail to the side, and then on the main part of the screen, switch between other apps to get everything you need and directly paste it into the message.

Mail snapped to the side of IE

Print

Printing is still a common need–to print a ticket, receipt, or coupon you received in email–and it’s something every Windows user expects to just work. In Release Preview, you just need to select the email you want to print, then open the Devices charm and select the printer you want to print it with.

Printing in Mail

Share

Mail integrates with the Share contract so that you can easily share to Mail from any app. Many times you don’t want to send something to your entire social network. Instead, you want to send a link, some photos, or a game score to just a few of your friends. Mail provides a great way to accomplish targeted, private sharing from other apps via the Share charm. If you’re sharing with the same group of people again and again, Windows remembers that group so it’s easier to share with them the next time.

Open the Share charm from IE and you’ll see a list of the people you commonly share with using Mail

Mail supports sharing text, links, and pictures. If the app provides a public URL, Mail automatically grabs a picture, title, and description from the webpage. Then, you can add your message and send it to your friends. Using Mail from the Share charm looks and behaves the same as the when you compose a new message in the Mail app, so all your formatting keyboard shortcuts still work, like CTRL+B for bold.

When you share from a webpage, you can send a preview in Mail

Live tiles

We expect modern devices to always be up-to-date with the latest info. The Mail tile does this by rotating through the last 5 unread and unseen messages. This lets you know if there is something new since the last time you checked your email.

You can also create a secondary tile for any email folder or account, and pin that to the Start screen to see live updates of new mail in just that folder or account. This is very convenient if you use server rules to automatically move email to another folder.

For example, I’ve arranged Start to have separate tiles for my corporate Exchange account and my Hotmail account, so I can easily tell if I have new email in either account.

You can pin tiles to the Start screen for any email account or folder

You can also put these secondary tiles on the lock screen so it’s easy to see if you have new email and what folder it’s in, without signing in to your device.

Lock screen with new mail counts for both Exchange and Hotmail

If you want to know immediately when new email arrives, you can turn on notifications for each account by going to Settings, and then Accounts.

New email notification

Of course, all of these are customizable, and if you prefer, you can reduce the amount of information that appears on the tiles or the lock screen. You can turn off Live tiles individually for each of your pinned folders or accounts. Notifications can be controlled for each account from the Settings charm, and include a sleep mode with several levels of silencing.

Always up to date

On a modern device, we just expect to have our email (and other information) always up to date. We also expect our apps to be respectful of CPU usage and battery life. Mail strikes this balance by using the background processing APIs built into Windows 8. These allow the Mail app to be suspended, but still wake up the email sync engine when new email arrives (push) or when a timer fires (polling). We’ve factored the email sync engine into a separate process so that only the minimal amount of functionality is run to keep you up to date and preserve the battery. This is what drives the Mail app’s tile and notifications.

Mail has account-specific settings, so that you can choose the configuration that works best for each account on your device. By default, all accounts will download new email “as items arrive” (push), but you can configure that to happen every 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, or manually.

We want to prevent bill shock, so we try to use the minimal amount of data necessary while still delivering a great experience. One way we prevent out-of-control data usage is to only download the last 2 weeks of email by default. We’ve found that most people only actively engage with the last 2 weeks of email, so we don’t download all of the messages in your multi-gigabyte email account unless you specifically configure it that way for any given account. Also, this provides a much faster first download, so you can start acting on your messages more quickly.

Mail default account settings for Exchange

If you’re on a metered network where you pay per MB of data you use, Mail uses the new networking APIs in Windows 8 to detect this, and only downloads the first 20KB of each message body and no attachments. For the majority of messages, this is the entire thing. If it’s a larger email, it’s just one tap to download the rest of the message. If you’re on Wi-Fi, the entire message is downloaded by default.

What’s next

Email is an important part of our daily lives. We’re still continually working to improve Mail and have many more features on the way. Today we’re excited about the response to the app and the first preview release. We believe that people want a great email app that meets their modern expectations and, based on usage, we are seeing this in the Windows 8 Mail app.

Will there be support for sending emails via aliases ? It is very annoying that WLM and Outlook do not support this feature and one has to switch to the website every time one wants to send an email not from the main E-Mail address but an alias!

It's a nice and simple app for phones but i'd rather use a real program like outlook, since when do we need apps for computers, apps are for phones. This new version of windows is the dumbest thing i have ever had the misfortune of uninstalling. Long live Windows 7 (bring on sp2)

My biggest gripe with email is the utter confusion and incompatibility between various email apps issued by the same company. I don't want, I demand full compatibility. Neither Microsoft nor Apple have seen fit to meet my reasonable demands for full compatibility. Apple is only less guilty than Microsoft because they haven't issued as many email apps.

I mean really is it too much to expect that I can import AND export between Metro Mail, Windows Live Mail, Outlook Express, and the current Outlooks for both Windows and Mac? Can the code be that hard to write?

Full import/export/merge abilities would show me that Microsoft really cares about the fact that I've used several of their mail products on different platforms.

Second biggest email gripe. I don't, and won't read email on any full-screen app because it looks uncomfortable and stupidly too big. I don't even open email apps full screen on my 15in laptop! Depending on what I'm doing I might have either Outlook 2011, Outlook 2010 or Apple Mail open, and never full screen. A giant Metro full-screen email app would be unusable to me.

One thing that bothers me about many of the Metro style apps is that while some of them do support keyboard shortcuts, there seems to be no way to discover/learn/find them other than either knowing them from experience with desktop apps, or trying every key/combination on the keyboard. I wish there were something like accelerators in menubars or keytips in ribbons, where you could hold a key like ALT or CTRL and see all the shortcuts available. Actually, why not also just make ALT bring up the app bar instead of the odd Windows + Z? This would both be semi-consistent-ish with some desktop apps like IE, be simpler and more convenient, and connect smoothly to keyboard shortcut discovery.

In my book RSS is email. In fact, that is how Outlook works for me. In fact, I would rather leverage Hotmail to keep track of my RSS feeds for me so that my RSS read status is kept in sync across all my devices.

When I reply to emails through the Mail app, they lose their conversation threading state. In other words, when I look at them in Outlook, every reply in an email chain looks like it is starting a new Conversation thread, not continuing the original thread to which I am replying. This happens when replying from Windows Phone as well. Replying through Outlook or other devices properly continues the conversation thread.

Is it just me, or does anyone else feel an instant surge of rage when you come across the marketing term, “fast and fluid?” That term is used three separate times within this particular post.

“It needed to be fast and fluid, be great with touch and a keyboard and mouse. . . .” “We realized that switching accounts and folders wasn’t fast and fluid enough. . . . “ “The reading pane makes it fast and fluid to switch between messages. . . .”

This has to be the least informative blog post I have read out of all posts relating to Building Windows 8. The blog is actually trying to make it seem as if there is some super, new functionality with the Mail app. Snap: yep, I have always had a problem with using email alongside with other applications. Print: Whew. Finally, I can print my messages. Thank goodness. Glad this is fixed. Share: Well, since cut and paste is so out-of-date, I’m glad we have the “contracts” now. Live Tiles: Hmm. Big @** RSS feeds. Notifications: Yep, Outlook never provided that feature.

2012! The year that I have officially started to become a MSFT “hater.” With all of the greatness (no sarcasm here) baked into the architecture of Windows 8, all MSFT wants to do is just focus on Metro and do a great disservice to all dedicated Desktop users.

Have you guys bothered to try viewing multiple attachments, primarily photo attachments? It just doesn't work, there is no "view as slideshow" etc, and having to click each photo to download when someone attaches 30+ photos is a pain. Check the functionality before releasing the final of this please. This is a ginormous improvement over the Consumer Preview, but still miles away from what Windows Live Mail offers.

@B POP/IMAP are for geek people. Consumers don´t know what POP/IMAP are, so they will flee away from metro/windows if they encounter an option they don´t know for what can be. So if you want POP & IMAP stay on desktop with all the other geeks.

I really wish I could try out the Mail app, but it has been a complete fail for me, apparently because my Windows Live account is a non-Hotmail account. This has prevented me from using Windows 8 much at all, since I can't get my e-mail. I could understand if, say, GMail didn't work or something, but Microsoft's own e-mail system doesn't work?

Now that there is a browser for Metro that has bookmarks (Chrome), this e-mail fail is the only thing holding me back from trying Windows 8 more.

Also, like several other commenters, I have a WP7 phone and love the e-mail app there, so if you can just make it match that as much as possible, you'll have a winner.

Have we gone back in time? This would have been a great, interesting read … back in 1999! Isn't it obvious that all those embarrassingly limited fullscreen APPS are completely useless for desktop users due to much, much more powerful free PROGRAMS available?! I can only shake my head in complete disbelief…

Microsoft has more than a billion users, so at any point, your design philosophy slowly changes in response to the dominant needs, the needs of most users. You have given many detailed examples of this "dominant" approach in this post, and exactly why.

But you know what would be even smarter?

When a user uses an application such as Mail (or, indeed the OS as a whole) for the first time, they are presented with a dialog box that asks them what style of user they are are. There should be at most three or four types available. The first choice should be the dominant one at the moment. But there should be other ones. For the mail app example, there could be the "Enthusiast" type, with a description of what they expect and most want from the app (deeply nested folders, tagged and colored categories, threaded conversations etc.).

Then, based on what the user says about what type of user they are, the app must flexibly adapt itself to that type. They will then get an app that better needs their own requirement and expectations. I call this an "adaptable user interface style". (The implementation should be data-driven, with a file containing such broad preferences.)

You have no time to implement this adaptable approach in time for the Windows 8 release. I get it.

But, you would be very, very smart to seriously consider such an approach for Windows 9 (and for other major software you make).

For keyboard users, it would be very helpful to be able to use the first character or characters to quickly select a folder. Having to arrow up/down through them is very tedious. Also, it there going to be a keyboard shortcut to move to the next unread message?

Another confirmation from me that Mail app DOES NOT play nice with non-@Live.com/@Hotmail.com (custom domain name) Live IDs even though Calendar and People are fine with them.

Since latest update I did at least get it initially working custom domain, but it has literally just blanked the whole account config from out of Mail AGAIN with no warning, and if I try to workaround it by adding my Live ID as an Exchange account that works for a bit, but then blanks it's details randomly and means I have to remove duplicates from People and Calendar that can understand both intended Live ID and workaround account!

Lesser issues (in comparison) are:

– On full initial start-up Mail app is very slow to load, feels slower than full Outlook although I haven't timed it yet

– On opening/switching back to, or definitely when clicking left column Account name, it should jump messages view up to top as I had initial occasions when Live Tile said I had new messages, so I jumped into app and my messages list still looked the same. At the very least you should flash the scrollbars for messages view visible so people can notice that they are now able to scroll up and that's where the new messages are hiding

– There should be ability to white-list specific emails or domains to always show pictures, not leave us the choice of unsecure 'Show all pictures by default' or annoying repeated click 'Show images' again and again per email

– On a similar vein you said Mail is designed to help with common tasks…I would suggest flagging Junk mail is an all too common task (just look how prominent it is on any web mail interface)

– I can't understand why Mail app is lacking things such as the great conversation view from Windows Phone 7…surely Metro 8 should meet or exceed all features of Metro 7…and it doesn't yet which makes me worry for Windows Phone 8 too

The Win + X shortcut in desktop should be changed for Win + Z, because Win + X is not far away appart on the keyboard in any language I know and could be used in Metro apps much frequently. (German speaking and slavic countries use the qwertz layout…). Also, it is really hard to find out any keyboard short cuts, which would be consistent in every app. (like Backspace for return etc.) There should be more consistency, and more options (but I guess that is on its way, as Metro apps can be updated on a weekly or even daily basis easily).

There also needs to be better sharing/ syncing between devices, that aren't connected through MS Account. Many people just want to be able to simply (and securely) connect their Windows Phone, or a Windows RT/8 device and sync the newest changes between them. This could work on a write-PIN basis (which could be generated over and over again for secure connections). You could sync large files (no need fot IP adress and Network storage or Home group setup -> very fast) over wi-fi, ethernet cable, usb, thunderbolt very simply (just pick a computer name, write generated PIN to both of them and everything would be setup for you…). You could also use ethernet + wi-fi for better speed.

This is the weakest point of every Windows device. It is just to hard to share data in countries, where data connections are expensive/ limited or if you don't want to sync large files through the internet. (Like if you just want to copy something to your friends computer very fast…).

I want all the features in the Windows Phone app version be present in the Metro app. And please add support for other email clients such as Yahoo!Mail, etc. And make the third column auto-fit so I don't need to scroll from left to right, if possible. Cheers!

And without POP3/IMAP support, it's useless to me. And I need the ability to reply to an email sent to my email address A, as if replying from email address B as well (iPhone supports this). That's because email I get on my POP3 server over 3G cann't be sent out over 3G because they have a restriction that they'll only forward mail sent from within their own network (ISP/Roadrunner). So When replying while remote (via a tablet session on the road, say), I'll need to be able to reply to my POP3 email by sending "from" my Gmail or Live.com email address.

Threaded messages are required to even start playing the game.

And as @AZJack said, I need to have mail stored locally, and when I move to a Win8 tablet, I need to be able to import all the email from my old Windows Live Mail instance on my Win7 laptop, so taht I have my email with me… and can access and read it off line if need be.

Most email functions are personal choice so I would suspect any email app will have things about it that individuals don't like. Still, I hope the Metro email app is on a fast track to increased functionality.

I would like to see a greater focus (or at least some focus) on mail security. Mail and Web are the two primary attack vectors on most computers. Yet there is zero information on how secure this app is – which leads me to believe it is not secure at all. Please Please Please embed security into it, as it stands now there doesn't seem to be any at all, for example, it automatically downloads images from non-secure domains and seems to trust all senders – a complete 180 degree reversal from previous policy.

Metro on windows phone is absolutely beautiful but metro style on windows 8 is just unattractive and looks horrible.

One OS for all device is a great idea but we are not there yet. If Microsoft wanted to develop a tablet OS then they should have optimized windows phone OS for tablets and stick with windows 7 for desktop OS, after all windows 7 is the best selling OS out there.

Threaded view? In general, I'm finding it quite disappointing how extremely basic all the default apps are. The apps should be the poster children of how to build a proper Metro app yes, but also how powerful WinRT apps can be. Right now, I'd say all the apps are below WP7 apps in quality, capabilities and polish. I'm hoping these get further improvements, especially the Photos app, but there's a long way to go…

Okay, the e-mail app seems to be doing better with my non-Hotmail Windows Live account now. I took these steps:

1. Went to the Store and searched for the Mail app. It found the Mail/Calender/People/Messaging app and it had a link for me to install it. What? I had assumed there was no update for the Mail app, since nowhere did the store tell me that some of my installed apps had updates available. Did I need to press a hotkey to bring something up in the Store app so it would tell me I had updates available? After that install, now the Mail/Calendar/People/Messaging app (can we come up with a shorter name for this app?) says "You own this app." So maybe an update installed.

I find it annoying that there are no version numbers in any of the Details about apps in the store. Are version numbers too complex for Grandma?

2. Went back to the Mail app, still no mail showing, deleted my account and re-added it. Mail showed my e-mail! What a great feature! And in the few hours I've used it, the e-mail hasn't disappeared yet. I should probably restart and see if it stays.

Could the live tile show the subject line of the top 3 (or whatever) emails, instead of so many details about one message? I think it's common to have a few unread emails waiting to be read so I think the live tile would be more useful if you could see them all at a glance, not just the email that happened to arrive most recently.

I have use Win8 RP and I got a problem with audio. When I listen my song in win8. Sometime My computer Hangs. Sound like KRRRKRKRKR come out from speaker. It's on full volum. later 5 thing I can use cursor, keyboard and it's play normal.

Why is the "Pages" setting missing from the Print device settings in the Mail and IE10 Apps? It means that I can only print out entire mail messages or web pages, instead of being able to just print the current page or a selection.

The Metro Reader App displays a "Pages" setting in the Print device settings – why not the Mail and IE10 Apps?

Metro needs a notification center. This toaster-type of notification (see or miss) isn't good. I don't want to wait for every live tiles to pop a notification. In the first place, I would not even have the idea what live tile will I look at!

Just imagine if I have dozens of live tiles and each one pops notifications. Rest in peace my eyes.

Mail doesn't support my main IMAP account and while it recognises my Google account (it correctly lists all the folders) it doesn't display any emails, despite supposedly being synced. From my perspective it's a complete disaster, just like so many of the bundled Metro apps. If Microsoft wants people to take Metro seriously its going to have to do a LOT better.

The desktop experience in Windows 8 is great; an improvement over Windows 7. Unfortunately the implementation of Metro is incredibly poor and its functionality is incredibly restrictive. I have a 30" monitor and rarely run apps in fullscreen, yet that is required for Metro (aside from the occasionally useful but generally too small side-snap mode). Not only that but very few apps take advantage of vertical space, meaning that typically 40% of my screen is completely blank – this wouldn't be an issue if it was running on the desktop and contained in a window, like Windows has always done previously. I'm sure Metro apps are great on a tablet but on the desktop they're terrible. 🙁

The mail app is one of the few Metro apps that are usable (to a certain extent at least). However, if suffers from one critical issue, which is not specific to the mail app but rather a general issue in Windows 8: When you try to save an attached file you cannot create a new folder! The official response from MS has been to use the desktop Explorer to create the folder, but, seriously, that has to be a joke, right? See answers.microsoft.com/…/51bfbee1-698b-40f0-9836-4ecd63e1970d for the gory details.

It's looking quite promising (assuming obvious stuff like IMAP/POP, etc. gets added by actual release date) – but add me as another voice wondering where the conversation (threaded) view is? In Metro I think it'd look brilliant in a Gmail-esque style with a single entry per conversation in the message list and then a stacked set of messages (with contact pictures) in the content pane…

…but more than any issue of look and feel, *please* ensure that you provide a mail app that finally does *real* conversations (i.e. based on reply/forward of earlier messages) – currently even with the latest all-Microsoft product set (Office 365 + Outlook 2010 + WP7.5) all you actually get is "group by subject", which is *hugely* annoying and IMHO renders the so-called conversations feature pretty much useless!

@Microsoft, you still didn't fix the comments, people are still complaining about lost comments here.

@Microsoft, speaking of which, the blogs don't remember my sign-in automatically. Each time I visit I have to click sign-in. And most of the time sign-in doesn't work on the first try (probably for the same reason it loses comments, the page was opened some time ago, and something expired/timed out).

On topic, the Mail app is almost unusable.

1. I also have a Windows Phone, so while working at my laptop I hear new mail notifications. I rarely receive a similar notification from the Windows 8 Mail App. Maybe 5-10 minutes later. Although my accounts are set to download as items arrive.

So when I hear the new mail sound on my phone, I open the mail app on my PC. No new mail messages. Then I right-click, and select sync. No new mail messages. Then I close the app by dragging from the top and open it again. No new mail messages.

Then I try manual sync again. This time it usually displays unread counters on my accounts (if I'm lucky). But in the central pane, no new messages are displayed, because the new messages are not automatically scrolled into view. I have to scroll manually to see the new messages.

2. When reading emails, I can't copy URLs from the mail. I right click on URLs, and nothing happens, no context menu.

3. When composing mails, I can't insert tabs to indent my paragraphs. If I press tab, it just cycles between the UI elements. I have to indent with spaces.

I was wrong to be optimistic that non-Hotmail Windows Live accounts were working any better. Got up this morning, woke up my Windows 8 PC, went to the Mail app, and it was a blank screen. Thought for a minute about how to get to the settings (is it the App Bar, is it the Charms?), got there, went to Accounts, no accounts were listed. Okay, maybe it forgot my account. Went to add a new account, put in my Live account information. Got the message "You have already added this account."

This is early alpha quality software being paraded around as Release Preview. You are wasting my time. Back to Windows 7 until RTM.

Based upon large amounts of telemetry, we have decided to make the Mail app experience faster and more fluid by removing the ability to write e-mail. Consumers these days are focused on content and consumption. Things like "New message" and "Reply" get in the way of the Metro philosophy. We think this change will make the Mail app a favorite for all types of users – touchscreens or tablets.

In my opinion the mail app is the best app of the ones that come preinstalled. Compared to other apps it starts relatively fast and is quite stable and functional. The loading time has been significantly improved since the CP version, and the design in the Release Preview is better, too.

What I don't like at all is the text that's automatically appended to every email. Even the Hotmail team realized we live in 2012 and don't need ads anymore at the bottom of outgoing mail.

Another thing that still needs improvement is the live tile. I often find out that the tile isn't updated when new mail arrives (or maybe I don't wait long enough?). Afaik the tile should be updated instantly through push-notification. The tile updates in general still need to be improved, they work pretty unrealiable here (messages app for instance).

I fear that you won’t look at the details enough and the desktop UI will remain with remnants of gel shading and loony tune icons form XP/Vista transition, if I am in Windows 8 and I click properties of C drive what is the window that comes up – Windows 95 graphs, mmm, put some effort into it, the same or even more detail and effort than you put into the new resilient file system for example, cover every detail with an obsessive quest for perfection, don’t leave us with a half baked Frankenstein.

I cannot stress enough – there is no point having everyone in the teams work on a ground-breaking features for the product if you cannot present it properly – every detail has to be considered, every part of the visible screen estate to the user has to be scrutinized – if you don’t do this then I personally will be very sad to have to work daily potentially for a another few years with outdated UI.

Please designers put some real love into this – I consider the design to be of the upmost importance to the success of the product, you have had your little spell of tablet Metro enthusiasm, now give us a desktop visual update that we can all be proud of and enjoy.

Full screen "apps", eh? I knew you couldn't quit me. Let's make up and get back to word processing and communication, 80's style. My C:> prompt is tanned, rested, and ready. How about a nice session of EDLIN, the original Metro app.

Please listen! you did promise Steven in very early posts that design would come into play toward the end of the build. The back and forward button are too close togather in Explorer they need at least 3-5 pixel in between them (the flat blue is cool) – replace every single icon in the system with high quality flat color metro versions, EVERY icon.

In terms of this email app – I just hope Office come with an more sophisticated Outlook or the teams get this desktop UI right – just because it’s a tablet app doesn’t mean everything has to be in a state of ultra-accessibility mode – we still like things to look cute – that is why I prefer email on the iPhone instead of my Nokia Lumia 800 – the email list just doesn’t look cute and compact enough.

Wow, everything is getting flat, possibly to extend the life of a battery on an inexpensive, junky tablet I'll never own. Shadows and shading are what give depth to UI elements. Look at XP for example. XP windows overlapping each other are just a bunch of intersecting lines. On the other hand overlapping windows on Mac Lion appear as actual rectangular objects some of which are "on top of" or "in front of" others. That gives the display a recognizable real-world appearance that is comfortable to look at. Got any telemetry on that one?

No way to "open" a message so you can see it's entire contents without using the scrollbars? Yes some of are still using the mouse and keyboard — maybe hundreds of millions of users? C'mon Microsoft either call this Windows for tablets or actually treat your customers like we actually exist with the technology we have in our hands today. I have one of the tablets from Build and when it's docked (most of the time it is) I use mouse and keyboard because it's faster than reaching up to touch the screen. You guys are fooling yourselves to think that touch on the desktop will be a priority for most — no it's just you.

I love the idea of a Metro style Mail app. I would like to see the Inbox and other primary folders be moved across the top of the screen to give more room to the Inbox message list and the actual email. User folders could be a drop down. Or, a way to view an email full screen would work as well.

How about Windows Sidebar gadgets? WIll you update them to have metro-look? How about Windows Media Player? I wonder if you still have the time to do it – you got all your hands to fix and update all these metro apps to become actually usable.

I have tried to get this application to work with Exchange since the Consumer Preview with no luck. Worked with Rackspace and the Windows 8 Forum personnel. Submitted logs of the problem to Microsoft. Tried changing my Microsoft Account (because I use the same email address). Key take away, while the app has nice design goals and may have achieved them, one missing goal appears to be troubleshooting. Mail connection problems when they occur can be a bear to resolve, and IT and consumers have little help to debug such issues as I am having, other than just randomly changing mail, network, firewall and account settings and hoping something works.

I appreciate your efforts, Team around Jeremy Epling. I look forward to a mailing solution which unifies my mail accounts as seamlessly as the Opera browser does. If you deliver such an experience I will be willing to cross over.

Nevertheless, you need to implement at least POP support, let me set a constant value for cc/bcc field (i.e. for every message that recipient is included automatically), let me choose to create real text messages and last but not least show ALL my messages in my mailbox not only the recently received ones.

2. Make mail fun, fast, and fluid. Take a look at fluid.io. I, personally, love it.

3. Hyperlinking isn't under the default formatting options? Why? I use it all the time, to reference help articles from various sources without breaking the flow of the sentence structure. I'd say I use it far more than Bold, Italic, and Underline.

What would be nice to have is a customize-able font modification pane. If a user uses Bold, Hyperlink, and Font Color a lot, those should be the first three listed, and if they seldom use underline, quotations, and highlighting, they should be able to stash those in the 'More' button.

I still prefer using the Windows Live Mail program. The Mail app doesn't seem to do anything that it doesn't do. One difference between them would be that the desktop program would not have been written with power consumption in mind, but the Mail app would have been. If you can show some usage studies about the power savings which happen if a user uses the Mail app, instead of the desktop client, I'd be more inclined to switch over and live with its limitations. But without that, all I can do is judge between the two based off of what I want a mail client to do.

Will there be a newsgroup reader? I used that feature of Windows Live Mail, but I don't see a metro equivalent anywhere.

Also, I echo @jcopenha … the "before the @ sign" label needs to be used, as I have multiple accounts with most email providers.

Releasing the Mail app that isn't at LEAST on par with mail on WP7 and iPhone, will be a significant problem. You need to be able to do EVERYTHING those apps do, at the very least, and do them easily and intuitively.

Even more, I think a pass needs to be made through the UI to make it better/easier to use on Desktops and LARGE monitors that are close to a person's face… the ability to control font size is vitally important, and to be convenient to use with mice as well (i.e. some option to put the formatting bar up top rather than down below).

The place where Win8/Metro will have value in the market is being the OS that will integrate with ANYTHING… apple iCloud mail, yahoo mail, google mail, and all the services used by everyone. This really needs to be a primary focus: WORK WITH EVERYTHING, and if it's not out of the box, allow developers to easily extend to work with anything.

I think this is a big problem in all of the Metro apps, the lack of any logging or diagnostic problem-solving tools. As long as it "just works" you are fine, but if something goes wrong there is nothing to help figure out where the problem is. Hopefully as the apps mature more useful logging and diagnostic info will be embedded.

I don't know why I could comment in the older blog post about IE10, but I'll put it here:

As great as the speed and looks might be, I certainly won't use it, because it has no add-blocking capability. That is #1 to me and a great many others. As soon as a metro browser (such as chrome) is available I will be uninstalling IE10.

There are these new "toaster" notification that pop up. I was busy doing something, and just caught one out of the corner of my eye when it was disappearing. There's NO WAY to go and see what it was! No notifaction center at all, that keeps the last several notifications for you to look at, at your leisure. This is a HUGE gap in functionality, imho.

I'm also a bit confused about some potential functionality… there have been BLOG entries about how Win8 can use data over 3G and 4G networks, but … can it send SMS messages? Receive them? Can Messenger receive messages in the background, and pop up notifications (if you want) when someone messages you, goes on line, etc?

There seems to be tons of potential here, but I'm not sure I'm seeing enough of it materialized…

"It's a nice and simple app for phones but i'd rather use a real program like outlook, since when do we need apps for computers, apps are for phones. This new version of windows is the dumbest thing i have ever had the misfortune of uninstalling. Long live Windows 7 (bring on sp2)'

Oh God, shut up. Nobody believes you've even seen Windows 8, much less used it. So stop lying and take your trolling elsewhere.

Why 3D UI was removed from a 2012 operating system? I mean UI, not UI animation. For me 2D is real ugly in 2012, but I want to understand why MS have done this. Usability studies? Observing trial subject? Is has something to do with our brains? etc, etc

The Mail app looks great. But the initial design of the Mail app was much better. Because the content here isn't full screen. This looks much better on a PC with a big screen. See the video below (1:36). This also applies for the other communication apps. Is this the final version of the Mail app?

No POP/IMAP support makes this app of limited use for me – at least on pc. That and the lack of useful filters (Similar to 'Unread mail' , 'Mail from contacts', etc) means I'll continue to use Windows Live mail both both email and calendaring for the foreseeable future. This also continues the trend of what appear to be feature stripped apps in Windows 8 that will likely suffice on a tablet, but leave pc users sans expected functionality.

In short, Latest version is an improvement, but you've got a ways to go.

@_alex74_ no actually – you have got it wrong, Apple has a glorified unix gui working on it’s locked hardware, Windows wants to give us a complete product that allows us to achieve anything without boundaries and with a choice of ‘very good’ hardware, companies and people other than Apple have the right and talent to design beautiful products, the term ‘post pc’ makes me sick – if these Apple devise aren’t personal computers, then what are they – authoritarian computers?

Very good design. i like your work and thank you for sharing with us such interesting info. As I am sure you know, in spite of the usual trolls, most of us appreciate the professionalism, and user-oriented approach you're taking in sharing openly with everybody so much of your work.

So, Mail looks very very nice. I'd like to suggest you strongly integrate it with Outlook – if not current version, then Outlook 15 – so that it pulls out information from it (PST/OST files) when it is actually installed and used by more advanced users. This way, one could chose whether to access mail accounts via the simpler Metro Mail app, or thorugh the desktop based Outlook. Of course, I expect Outlook 15 to be significantly more Metro-friendly, but still, a desktop version will continue to be the daily work tool for many of us.

Similarly, I hope the Calendar App can do the same in terms of Outlook sync/integration.

This link leads to my breakdown of which improvement I feel could be made to the Mail App. I made it in the form of a webpage because I felt that it could much better convey my ideas than simply posting a text comment.

And have you considered to use the accent color for the Mail app and the other communication apps (tile and app)? This is a great way of personalization. And the start screen looks much cleaner. Thank you for the reaction.